In conjunction with this morning’s announcement that Grab will be working with Anthropic and OpenAI to develop their artificial intelligence technology, Grab has also introduced new AI technology developed to help both merchants and driver partners on its platform.
Grab has introduced two AI agentic technologies through AI Merchant Assistant and AI Driver Companion that will help merchants and Grab drivers to optimize their businesses and trips more smoothly.
Starting with AI Merchant Assistant, it is a chatbot that combines the use of language models together with data available through the GrabMerchant app to give merchants access to their business data quickly and easily.
Through this chatbot, merchants can get weekly and monthly sales and profit data, help in terms of how merchants can increase their weekly and monthly sales, and create advertising and promotional campaigns that will give their customers more options to buy more attractive food combos.
Soon, AI Merchant Assistant will also give business owners the option to get financial loans from other Grab services such as Grab Finance and GX Bank.
As for AI Driver Companion, as we all know, Southeast Asia’s roads are one of the most difficult to navigate. This AI feature will be integrated into the Grab Driver app to help Grab’s drivers be more efficient in their driving.
This AI feature will use driving history on the Grab Driver platform to recommend locations where demand for driver-partners is higher. Previously, the AI Driver Companion feature was seen guiding drivers to drive to passengers’ destinations faster and safer using GPS data and their own developed digital maps.
AI Driver Companion has also been updated with a voice report feature, which will update drivers with details about the latest road conditions via AI voice. This means that Grab’s driver-partners can receive information about current or upcoming road conditions more quickly, and the AI can suggest alternative routes that can be taken without the driver having to do anything.
Since the new feature was introduced, Grab says it has received 16,000 reports from 900,000 drivers every day in the Southeast Asia region, which has helped GrabMaps to make the map a guide for Grab’s driver-partners to send more passengers to their destinations quickly and safely.
Grab says that the AI Merchant Assistant was developed with the help of both OpenAI and Anthropic’s natural language models to give merchants the best advice on how to run their businesses to generate the most clean profit at any given time.
For the new feature introduced through the AI Driver Companion, Grab has used GPT-4o and Real Time API to quickly and accurately compile and notify drivers on the road about roadblocks and incidents.